Anjin Unleashed: admin

Showing posts with label admin. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Admin: Post Seven Hundred

Seven hundred posts. I'm not sure how I feel about this milestone. Since my writing time has decreased, I thought it would take forever to get here. Then with the recent rush of posts, I find myself here unexpectedly.

Post 600 was back on May 30, 2012, more than a year ago. That's the longest hundred posts I've written since the first hundred. Unfortunately, I can't foresee things picking up during the next hundred. Maybe my daughter will give me a little more free time to write.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I looked over the last hundred posts and saw a couple of trends. The feminism tag suddenly popped up about a year ago. Those are a bunch of posts I really wish I didn't have to write. But I will continue to do so until we don't have to put that crap anymore. There was a stack of Guild Wars 2 posts. That lasted about two weeks before I got bored. Oh well. Finally, outside of GW2, there has barely been any mention of MMOs on the blog. I may have to turn in my MMO Blogger card.

One big change has been that I've started cross-posting to my Tumblr and Giant Bomb blogs. It's not much, but at least there are more people reading my silly little words.

Although there was a flurry of posts during E3, I have to put on the brakes for a couple of weeks. That's not a bad thing, though. I am going on vacation for a week, which will slow things down. As well, I am writing my next gamebook for the 2013 Windhammer Prize. I'm hoping to get it done sometime soon so that it can be playtested. (Hey, Blue Kae! Hey, Yeebo!) If you want to read the book ahead of time and help me make it better, let me know in the comments.

Thank you to everyone for reading. It continues to be a lot of fun.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Admin: Anjin On Buffy

Here's a temporary diversion while I work on a real post. I'd like to point you to a guest post I wrote for Buffy Month over at Stella Matutina. Memory, the blog's proprietor, approached my wife about guesting. She promptly passed the assignment on to me because she couldn't think of anything at the moment.

It's a slight little thing, with nary a bullet point in sight. But it still might be worth reading.

Now, back to the forges of blogging.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Admin: Anjin In Exile

Bullet Points is no more. Welcome to Anjin In Exile. I hope you enjoy your stay.

I would appreciate if you would pass along the news to any site that still lists the old link. I don't want to lose more readers than I have to.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Admin: Post Six Hundred

As we saw with the prior milestone, it took nine months to add another one hundred posts to the blog. I suspect that this is the new pace of the blog. And I don't think that's going to change any time soon, as the responsibilities of fatherhood will not be passing any time soon.

My top five posts for this period are a mix of old and new. Fifth place is perennial favorite By Request: Champions Online Q&A for no good reason that I can think off. I guess that there are so few Champions bloggers out there that they have to keep coming here for info. Sad, really. Also an oldie, but the by far the biggest draw is Top Five: EVE Online Stories. Everything something big happens in the game, I get a bunch of new hits. So in a completely mercenary fashion, I wrote Top Five: More EVE Online Stories in March. It obviously worked since it's on the list.

Other new posts in the top five include Random Shots: Are Pandas The Apples Or Oranges In This Metaphor?, which got the Tobold bump and completely threw off my page view graph, and Random Shots: Agreement By Degrees. Funny enough, I took it out of the list, but nestled between the posts were a bunch of links to a side page of mine, WoW Expansion Zone Planning List. It's an old hoax that I wanted to save, but people keep finding their way here. It was linked from the EU French language forum a while back after Mists of Panderia was announced. I hope that they could read my warning about the list property.

I would have sworn that there were no big games over the last several months, but I see in my old posts that four games have dominated my time: Dark Souls, Saints Row the Third, Mass Effect 3, and Project Copernicus. No, I haven't been playing that last one, but the crash of 38 Studios grabbed my attention for some reason.

Thanks to the Newbie Blogger Inititive, there has been a fair amount more traffic. So thank you to every one of my readers and commentors, both new and old. You all make it much harder for me to slack off around here.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Admin: Anniversary, the Fifth

In honor of this milestone, let's do something a little different.

It has been five years since I started blogging here at Bullet Points. At the time I was chafing against the constraints of my prior blog, Guild Wars Kira. I wanted a place where I could write about whatever was on my mind.

And this blog has certainly lived up to that. I've written about MMOs and found a small place in the MMO blogging community. But I've also written about PC and console gaming, about comic books and novels, about RPG worlds that exist only in my head, about podcasts and music. And I've written a very little bit about myself. There are little bits of me in all of these posts, like shards of a mirror strewn throughout the blog, each reflecting a fragment my life.

Blogging like this was actually a throwback to my first blog. Way back in 2002, I had a blog that I hand coded in HTML on my personal Charter server space. I shared Raven's Prayer with my wife and we posted book, movie, and game reviews. That page has long disappeared, but one remnant of it still exists here and there around the internet. That was where I posted my rules for Risus Firefly. (I really need to revise and repost that here someday.) Raven's Prayer was very personal. So when it was taken down in 2006 due to an ISP change, it was only a matter of time before I took up blogging somewhere else.

The bullet points thing came as a whim. As I state in my first post, I thought it would let me put up whatever random collection of thoughts that was on my mind without need of a connecting narrative. I didn't really expect to be writing long form posts as the blog evolved. By then the gimmick stuck and I think it makes the blog stand out, if only because of my bloody minded adherence to the shtick.

You might notice that the first post doesn't start with a category name. That conceit didn't start until the second post. I'm very happy to see that the practice has spread out to other blogs in a limited fashion. But, it has taken every bit of my self restraint not to go back and append "Admin:" to the subject line of my first post. But that would betray the history of this blog, this autobiography of the minutia of my life.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that, beyond starting an amazing family who I love very much, this blog may be the primary mark that I leave on the world. I think that I'll be okay with that. Here are my thoughts, cast out into the void, for anyone to peruse, to comment on, to link and share. No one knows how long it will persist. But I like to think that nothing is ever lost on the internet. Things just become harder to find.

So thank you to everyone who has ever read Bullet Points, whether it was because you were looking for a WoW gear auditor, for EVE Online's biggest stories, for a list of things to do before WoW's Cataclysm changed the old world. Or even because you were genuinely interested in what I have to say. Knowing that even one person gets something from these words has made all of this work so fulfilling.

Let's put these back on before I get too maudlin. I'm going to keep up with my hundred post anniversaries from here on out, just because I like being contrary about how I run things around here. But I felt that I couldn't let the occasion pass without comment.

Here's to another five years. Hopefully together with friends and family.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Admin: Wrecking The Curve

I was up late Wednesday night/Thursday morning, trying to soothe an unhappy baby. As I was feeding her, I noticed a new post by Tobold. A post wherein he linked back to my post discussing different reactions to Mists of Pandaria. My first thought was "Tobold actually reads my blog?" My second was "I wonder if anyone will follow that link."

Thank goodness that I don't pay for bandwidth or I would be in big trouble with my wife now.

It is always amazing to me when one of the top tier blogs like Tobold's MMORPG Blog, Player Versus Developer, or Kill Ten Rats links back to me. If there is any doubt about that Tobold is a major blogger, you just have to look at the spike on that graph. I'm sure that I received those hits because I found myself in the middle of the ongoing Tobold/Syncaine feud. Heck, Syncaine even commented on my post (which I appreciate. Thanks!)

Things have come back down to normal now. And I'll try to keep it here with more comic book and fake RPG campaign posts. But it was nice to have my moment in the blogging spotlight.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Admin: Post Five Hundred

Back when I wrote post four hundred, I had estimated that I would reach this post some time in June. Based on prior performance, it normally takes about seven months to knock out a hundred posts. This year has been anything but normal. Between dealing with both an attempted and a successful house break in, selling that house to the city and moving to a new one, as well as having our first child, the blog just could not compete for my attention. That everything I just mentioned only added two months to the timetable is amusing to me. I'm not making any guesses as to when the next milestone will be reached, but I'm fairly confident that there will be a six hundredth post.

Out of prior top five posts, only two of them have held on a spot here. My top post of last nine months was not one of them. Top Five: EVE Online Stories received twice as many hits as the next down. It has been a perennial favorite for months now. The post saw a major spike in activity June 27, 2011, at the height of MonocleGate.

Sometimes, you just want more hits. So I decided, in a perfectly mercenary way, to write a speculative post called Random Shots: The Expansion After Cataclysm. Considering that we knew absolutely nothing at the time, people have been eager for any news or rumors and I certainly cashed in on that. Hits have been consistant since posting, though they have been trailing off in the last month or two.

The prior top spot holder, Top Five: Things To Do Before Cataclysm, fell to third place this cycle. Hits stayed quite high from the start, spiking up on December 5 and 6, 2010, but then dying completely when Cataclysm launched December 7, 2010. It had a good run.

The other top five survivor, By Request: Champions Online Q&A is the little engine that could, averaging a hit every day, even though it was first posted way back in September 2009. The reason the post in on this list, though, is because of the surge in popularity it received on January 26, 2011, the day after Champions Online went free-to-play.

The final post in the top five is a little more unique in its trajectory. After the announcement of the collector's edition for Star Wars: The Old Republic, I wrote Random Shots: CEs The Way God Intended Them. It's not a post I'm super proud of, but it did its job. I posted it July 21, 2011, it spiked on July 22, 2011 after receiving a high profile link from Kill Ten Rats, and it was dead by July 29, 2011. So even though it only received hits for about a week, that was enough to get the post onto the top five. Thanks for all the traffic, Ethic.

Gaming has been, much like my posting, rather sparse over this cycle. Rift certainly dominated a couple months of my gaming time. Otherwise, there were a number of smaller games like Bastion, Torchlight, and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. And let's not forget Portal 2. So mainly I've been focusing on games that can be played and completed in a reasonable about of time while staying away from, or putting aside, the monster epics. As it stands, I'm not missing them.

On the creative front, I continue to be very happy with my Unexplored Worlds series. I only got five posts up in this cycle, but they are some of my favorites. And now I've started my Farewell To Ascalon series which is really exciting for me. And, funny enough, it's actually helping me to enjoy Guild Wars again, a game that I haven't been able to play for a few years now.

Finally, I would like to say thanks once again to all the commenters who make this place so much fun for me. So thank you to Blue Kae, Jayedub, Yeebo, MMO Gamer Chick, Bronte, Hunter, Tesh, and our newcomer, Straw Fellow. You make the hard work worthwhile. Now here's to the next hundred.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Admin: On Hiatus

I wasn't aware of this at the time, but it looks like the blog went on hiatus about a week ago and no one informed me. This came as a shock to me as there are at least three or four different posts I need to write. The fact that I have, so far, not actually written them is telling.

There is a lot going on. Too effing much, as a matter of fact. So much so that all I find myself playing on my PC is Zen of Sudoku and You Don't Know Jack. If anyone really wants me to write about either of them, I'm sure I could oblige. But let's be honest, you would be asking just to be polite.

So between dealing with the break-in, preparing for the baby, and preparing to move, I'm kind of swamped. Therefore I'm making this hiatus official for the time being. Keep your RSS readers handy, though. You never know when I feel the need to inflict my particular brand of bloggery on you all.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Admin: Post Four Hundred

As I guessed in my prior milestone post, it took about seven months to reach post four hundred. Even though I've had great months and bad months posting-wise, my output is pretty regular over the long haul. Look forward to the next milestone this coming June.

Four of my prior top five posts held onto their rankings. Far and away, my most popular post is Five Things To Do Before The Cataclysm. It is so popular in fact that beginning September 1, it started receiving more hits than my front page. I suspect that once December 7 rolls around, my pages views are going to crash. Good thing I blog just for fun.

Also holding onto the top five are two of my classic (read: old) posts about Free Realms, a game I haven't seriously played or blogged about in over a year. My news post about LotRO updating the epic quest line with a solo option is coming in fourth. I guess people are still finding out about it, even though the news is a year old. Finally my Top Five: MMO Classes post made it to the top five, mostly because my Champions Online Q&A is not drawing nearly as much attention as before.

Lest I complain about all the the old posts stealing the spot light, there were two more recent post that climbed into the top ten. My write-up about the Serpent Lantern adventure pack for Champions Online got a lot of attention. There aren't many blogger who regularly write about CO, so I don't have a lot of competition. (Hey, Blue! /wave) The other post was my sort-of review of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing game. I can attribute many of those hits to James Raggi linking it from his LotFP blog. Since Bullet Points isn't an RPG blog, I doubt there was much to keep anyone coming back, but it was nice to see one of my posts generate attention outside my regular community.

My gaming over the last seven months can best be described as scatter shot. I continued my trend of playing single player games primarily on the Xbox 360, moving from disk-based games to Xbox Live Arcade games over time. I dabbled here and there with various games and MMOs. But the only game and really sucked me in was Dragon Quest IX. I haven't picked up my DS in a while and I still need to finish the game. Some day soon, I'm sure.

Blogging about books and writing microfiction has trickled to almost non-existence over the last hundred posts. Instead, all of my creative output has gone into my Unexplored Worlds series. They may not draw the hits (that link to the Unexplored Worlds category is the highest at #49 overall) but they are some of my most satisfying posts on the blog. And based on the comments those posts received, it sounds like you enjoy them too. I don't see me ending that series anytime soon.

Speaking of comments, I want to take the time to thank everyone who stops by and leaves a kind word for me. From old friends like Blue Kae, Jayedub, and Yeebo to relatively new faces like MMO Gamer Chick and Hunter as well as everyone else who I'm forgetting, you are the ones who make this blog thing all worthwhile.

And now I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I announced back in June that I was working on a gamebook. Well, after a little prodding I have finally finished it. It is called Academy Of Magic: The First Term and it is ready for playtesting. It is no work of art, but I'm happy with the results. If you are interested in testing this thing before I post it for general consumption, send me an e-mail at the address listed over in the sidebar. I look forward to seeing what everyone thinks about it.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Admin: Post Three Hundred

It's that time again. Welcome to the three hundredth post here at Bullet Points. Just like last time, this feels like the perfect time to reflect on where the blog has gone over the last hundred posts.

Just like the run from 100 to 200, reaching three hundred took me about seven months. I can't see my posting frequency change much for the foreseeable future. I still enjoy writing for the four of you still reading, so I'm not going anywhere. At the same time, I don't have enough interesting things to post about to do any more than I am. Whether what I already post about is all that interesting is open for debate.

I started collecting site metrics about a year ago because I am a little bit of a freak. The cool thing about it is that I get find out about readers that are either passing through or lurking quietly without drawing attention to themselves. Please don't think that just because you don't comment that I don't love you. I lurk on too many blogs and never comment to ever pass judgment.

One of the benefits of watching all these numbers is to see the readership grow. Comparing the last seven months to the prior seven shows an approximately eighty percent increase in page views. I attribute most of that increase to the attention I got for blogging about Champions Online. The fervor around the game has passed, but some people have been nice enough to stick around anyway. For those of you looking to improve your blog's profile, I suggest waiting for the next bandwagon to come along and jump on. It really works.

From the top five posts on the site, two are old Free Realms favorites, both of which are almost a year old now. Three other posts have climbed up, though. The top post is my Top Five Things To Do Before Cataclysm. Cataclysm continues to be a big topic, so I'm not surprised people are feeling nostalgic about the old world. My Q&A about Champions Online pulled quite a few hits, mostly on the strength of the words "Kevin Poe" in that article. That guy is such a pain. Rounding out the top five was the news about Turbine adding a solo option for the epic quests in LotRO. An amazing update which I would love to try out if LotRO wasn't still crashing my computer.

Where in my last anniversary post I could identify definite gaming focuses, this cycle shows an almost gleeful bouncing around from game to game. If anything, the theme has been my triumphant return to single player gaming. Games like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Grand Theft Auto IV kept me quiet busy. I enjoyed the solo options in primarily cooperative games like Left 4 Dead and Borderlands. And in the last month I've rediscovered why I bought an Xbox 360 with Assassin's Creed and Brutal Legend. Not that I'm giving up on MMOs just yet. That lifetime sub for Champions Online has lived up to its promise, so I'll be in and around Millennium City whenever the mood strikes me.

One of the side effects of all my gaming is that I've done a lot less reading. And thus there's been a lot less blogging about books. I also cut way back on my comic buying, but I wasn't blogging about that so much anyway. Heck, I haven't even killed time with a random Top Five post for a while. Hmm.

On the creative side, my Microfiction stories have been few and far between. That's the kind of thing where something pops out only when the mood strike. On the other hand, I just started my Unexplored Worlds series. Focusing on encounters for the pen-and-paper roleplaying games gives my creativity the kind of structure it needs to produce regular work. I'm not sure how many of you still roll a d20 with any regularity, but feel free to use this stuff as inspiration for your own games.

With any luck, we'll see post four hundred before the end of the year. I look forward to seeing where the journey takes us.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Admin: Post Two Hundred

It was only February of this year that I reached my one hundredth post here on Bullet Points. It only took seven months to reach this next milestone. I'm more serious about blogging now. And I'm having more fun, too. So I want to take a few moments to reflect on how far I've come and where I'm going.

Posts over this timeframe have been marked by two major releases: Free Realms and Champions Online. My bullishness on both games saw me posting time and again about them. This in turn has increased my traffic from Google. I don't know how many of those people ever come back to the blog, but it is a nice stroke of the ego to see people poking around.

As well, I've kept up with my promise to review all the books I've read this year. I'm only one review behind now, but I'll get to it soon. It's hard to write reviews when there is so much else to talk about. I try not to take it personally that I get so many fewer readers on those days.

Traffic on the site has increased from the ten to twenty hits a day I was getting beginning May 12. That was the day I took a poke at the Shut Up, We're Talking podcast over their avatar-as-token discussion. It may have been a negative way to go about it, but numbers don't lie. That was the post the opened the blog to a wider audience.

Since then, I have to be thankful to Tipa from West Karana and Syp from Bio Break for occasionally linking the site. Every time they do so, I see a big spike in hits. The biggest spike, though, came from the link to my head start impressions from Champions Online Daily News. That's quickly become one of my top five posts along with the Be Imba post and three Free Realms posts.

The best thing that's happened in this last one hundred posts is getting to know some of the people who read the blog, even just a little bit. So thank you to Yeebo, Ardwulf, Jayedub, the recently delurked Zeno, and all of my other readers and commenters for encouraging me to keep going.

I don't foresee Bullet Points changing much anytime soon. Unless I burn out on Champions and my posting cuts way back. I'm sure some of you wish I would. I'm looking forward to the next hundred and I hope you'll all stick around to see what's in store.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Admin: Grinding To Valhalla

In an act of desperation, Randolph over at Grinding to Valhalla asked me to complete one of his One Shot Interviews. Said interview is now available here should you be so desperate for something to read. Maybe you're having trouble falling asleep and require a soporific? Just do not read before driving or operating heavy machinery.

Okay, that's it for blatant plugs. Back to my regularly scheduled idiocy.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Admin: Post One Hundred

What a long, strange trip it's been.

This is my one hundredth post in just under two years. Not a massive achievement by any stretch of the imagination, but one I want to note anyway.

I started this blog in February 2007 after I stopped posting at Guild Wars Kira, an in-character blog about my time in GW. When I stopped playing that game, I decided I needed another outlet to write about whatever was interesting to me. Thus, we have this scatter shot of topics that few beyond myself could ever be interested in.

My posts tend to follow whatever currently holds my fancy. The crazy number of World of Warcraft posts should tell you how addicted to that game I was. And the next hundred will say the same about Lord of the Rings Online or some other game. Hopefully I'll have time to write about a few games other than MMOs as well.

I'm a little surprised I haven't posted more Top Five lists. Actually, I'm not that surprised. For something that is supposed to be a post filler, they do take a lot of thought and energy. I look forward to getting more out in the future, and not just to pass the time.

I've decided to post about all the new books I read this year. By new I mean new to me. That way I don't have to review any comics I reread, like Watchmen or Cerebus. I have missed writing about books, so this should be a fun challenge.

Another thing I'd like to do is more responses to the podcasts I listen too. So far I've only done the one, but I will write more so long as the podcasters give me something to write about.

Mostly, I just want to post more. I get about ten to twelve visitors a day right now and I would like to grow on that. Not everyone can be looking for links to Be Imba, can they?

Anyway, thank you for looking at this humble blog. I hope you find something here worth your time

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Admin: My First Hiatus

Only a couple posts in and I've already taken my first hiatus from the blog. There's got to be some sort of award for that, right?

Not that it was my fault, per se. I didn't want to hiate at that particular moment. It's just that my computer died and it was a very trying time. Not that I should make excuses. I could have found another computer to post from. But a man doesn't cheat on his computer, not while there is still hope she'll recover. Of course when she died, I immediately forgot about the old hag and upgraded to the newer, sexier model. Thus, I post. Everyone rejoice while my new computer and I get acquainted.

I wonder what my wife will think of this post? Maybe Hiatus Part Two will start sooner than I'd like.

In the meantime, why haven't I heard about this until now? I do love me some Talisman.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Bullet Points, The First

I'm Anjin and this is my introductory post. Hi.

Yes, I know that the user name shows up as Kira Lanfier. That's the name I used for my first blog, Guild Wars Kira and I can't be bothered to do anything about that. Okay?

I think that bullet points are the single most perfect method of conveying random bits of information in a way that implies a connection without ever making those connections explicit. And since I named the blog Bullet Points, you should just assume that you'll be seeing a lot more of them.

I will be using this space to talk about any old thing. But since I'm most likely to be thinking about games and comics, that is what you are most likely to find here.

But who knows? I might just surprise you.

Yeah, fine. Go ahead and laugh.